


phantom

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Bevan with spooky deer traits, Crabs Bad, Gen, Pregame rituals, also talking a lot about that time Bevan was possessed by Landry, fucked up eldritch hotels, some casual speculation on what Up is like, talking about the absence of something you don't know how to explain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:07:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27799702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: Someone nearby is whispering. The words are too quiet to make out, but it’s a constant, low murmuration that winds around itself the way a creek babbles, with no pause for response or conversation. Something about the sound chills Kennedy to the bone. Maybe it’s the rapid ebb and flow of a voice whose source he can’t see yet. Or maybe it’s just the knowledge that he isn’t alone in this room, in the dark.(or: kennedy loser finds someone to listen to.)
Relationships: Kennedy Loser & Bevan Underbuck
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	phantom

The place where the Crabs go when they aren’t playing in the Big Leagues is - well, it’s not Baltimore, but it’s a serviceable hotel. _Serviceable_ , in that it has single-bed rooms where everyone can spend time alone, and lounges to spend time together, and kitchens, plural. _Serviceable_ , in that the beds are actually comfortable, and the showers work just right, and there’s a continental breakfast that’s always hot no matter when you show up to eat it. It’s actually a pretty nice hotel, by hotel standards.

Of course, the seams started showing soon enough. Kennedy spotted some of them from the very beginning. Mostly the fact that the rooms don’t always match, even ones that are on the same floor. Some look like they were made in the 70s, with tacky wood panelling and rotary phones, and some are much more modern, with flat screen TVs and charging stations. The floorplan likes to shuffle itself around, too, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. New rooms will appear, or old ones will suddenly move two floors down without any warning, a dining room suddenly where an indoor pool should be. The place is in a constant state of disorientation.

There are times Kennedy thinks the Hotel is fucking with him deliberately. There’s a sort of highway hypnosis inherent to navigating its winding hallways and staircases, and every time he thinks he’s learned the way to his room well enough to shut his brain off while walking there, something throws itself in his way. A dead end where there should be a fork. The entrance to an arcade where there should be an elevator lobby. It’s amusing the first time, and then it isn’t.

He’s trying to get back to his room for a nap after the Crabs’ 40th loss of the season when it happens again. He doesn’t feel the Hotel shift around him, because he never does, but he turns the corner expecting to see a stairwell and instead finds a doorway. It’s to someone else’s room - or maybe no one’s. The Crabs are the only people staying in the Hotel, as far as Kennedy has seen, so the other rooms are all presumably empty. This particular room door isn’t one he’s seen before, but it’s cracked open ever so slightly, like it wants him to come in.

Kennedy takes the bait and steps inside. The door shuts behind him but stays open just a crack, light from the hallway spilling sideways into a room blanketed by darkness.

Someone nearby is whispering. The words are too quiet to make out, but it’s a constant, low murmuration that winds around itself the way a creek babbles, with no pause for response or conversation. Something about the sound chills Kennedy to the bone. Maybe it’s the rapid ebb and flow of a voice whose source he can’t see yet. Or maybe it’s just the knowledge that he isn’t alone in this room, in the dark.

He stays frozen in place until his eyes adjust. The basic shapes of furniture are the first to emerge from the shadows, the soft corners of a bed and the harsher corners of dressers and tables. The last shape his eyes trace is a human figure standing in one of the far corners, shoulders hunched almost defensively, arms doing something Kennedy can’t quite comprehend. He looks a little longer before he realizes the person in the corner has their hands to their mouth, whispering into their cupped palms.

“Hello?” Kennedy asks, before he can help himself.

The figure turns. Their eyes catch the light from the crack in the door and reflect it in a way that is more animal than human, two glowing pinpricks that make Kennedy’s breath catch in his throat.

“Oh,” they say quietly. It’s a voice Kennedy recognizes, or has been learning to recognize - Bevan Underbuck’s. “Was I bothering you?”

“Uh, no,” Kennedy says. He doesn’t know what else he _can_ say. “I was...lost. I didn’t think anyone was in here.”

“Sorry,” Bevan says, in that way they have of always sounding like they’re right on the edge of bursting into tears. Now that they’ve turned around, Kennedy can see the antlers that jut out from either side of their forehead, budding and velvet-covered, half the size they used to be. The old ones were shed months ago, sometime during the commotion of election and ascension.

Bevan is the only one of the Fridays who Kennedy hasn’t really gotten a feel for yet, mostly because they have a skittishness about them that goes beyond shy. Breadwinner and McBlase have no problem inserting themselves into group activities or discussions, as far as Kennedy has seen, but Bevan always seems to lurk around the fringes, and jump when they’re acknowledged. Sometimes they just disappear when the Crabs leave the field. Kennedy doesn’t know where they go.

“Don’t be,” Kennedy says. “This is your room, right? I walked in on you.”

“It’s not my room.” Bevan sounds even more like they want to cry than they did before. One hand scratches anxiously at the prongs of their antlers.

Kennedy blinks, surprised. “What?”

“Um,” Bevan says. “Sometimes I don’t like my room because - because Baldwin and Evelton will come and find me, to try and talk, or to get me to do something together. And sometimes that’s okay, but sometimes -”

“Yeah,” Kennedy says. “I get it.”

“So I tried asking the Hotel to find me somewhere to be alone, a little while ago, and it did. And now I do that. When I want to be alone.” Bevan is looking at the floor, their eyes averted in embarrassment. They’re still picking at their antlers, velvet peeling off under their fingernails.

That answers one of Kennedy’s questions, at least. He still has plenty more, but some of them - _why are you in the dark, why were you standing in a corner_ , and so on - seem rude. Everyone on the team has their quirks. At least Bevan’s are more unobtrusive than committing crimes.

“Who were you talking to?” he asks, because that’s the thing he’s most genuinely curious about. Maybe Bevan was talking to themself, sure, but something about the private, reverent way they were whispering into their cupped palms says otherwise. Kennedy almost wonders if they were praying.

“Oh,” Bevan says. Their eyes slide up to Kennedy’s face, then back to the floor. “It’s - it’s nothing. I mean, nobody.” They pause. “Not anymore.”

Kennedy wonders if he shouldn’t let things lie at that, but he also wonders if the Hotel brought him here, to this room, for a reason. To show him what Bevan was doing. Of course, maybe that’s ascribing too much goodwill to the old thing - there’s a chance the Hotel brought him here to scare him, too. Or to scare Bevan.

Kennedy sits down on the bed, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. His knees are sore from catching in the last game. It didn’t bother him before, in the ILB, but now the Crabs are in the big leagues, and now everyone in the rotation but Bevan is cursed, throwing wild pitch after wild pitch. He bends himself even farther forward and runs his hands through his hair, feels the eyestalk-like antennae at his hairline bend under his palms.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he tells Bevan, finally. “If you don’t want to. I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business.”

“Uh,” Bevan says. They shift their weight from foot to foot, raise a hand as if to start scratching at their antlers again, then drop it back down to their side.

“I mean it,” Kennedy says.

“It’s - um, it’s okay. I think. It might be okay,” Bevan says, their voice quieter than before, almost the whisper it was when Kennedy first walked in.

Kennedy has the sense that Bevan wants to say something else, so he waits. He hunches over with his hands in his hair until his lower back starts to hurt, then sits up, stretching until he hears something in his spine pop. The sound barely fazes him. He’s too used to feeling his joints crack and complain in ways a thirty year old’s joints shouldn’t.

“I was talking to Landry,” Bevan says, in a voice so small it’s barely there at all.

Kennedy worries at his bottom lip with his teeth, unsure of what to say. He’s heard - mostly from McBlase II bragging about it - that Bevan was possessed by the Spirit of Violence once, years ago, for a single game. Kennedy always thought it was just hearsay, the kind of story that fans tell when they can’t comprehend a player batting better than their stars say they should. But maybe there was a grain of truth in the telling of it, after all.

“Landry Violence?” he asks Bevan, as if there’s another Landry that everyone in the league knows by first name alone.

Bevan nods. “I - I talk to him before every game. Sometimes after them, too. I used to - sometimes I could feel him listening. Even after he was -” Their face twists, and Kennedy watches them struggle for the words. “Even after he died.”

“I didn’t know you were that close,” Kennedy says, honestly.

“We’re not. Not really,” Bevan says, sounding apologetic. Their fingers are worrying at the hem of their shirt, maybe an attempt not to pick at their antlers again. “It was just the one time that we really...but I started talking to him after that. I figured if I had a piece of him in me, I should.”

It’s a sweet idea. Kennedy thinks it is, at least. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be possessed by Landry Violence, but he’s heard that you feel different afterwards, like you still have a splinter of the Spirit stuck in your soul. Kennedy doubts most people approach it with the politeness and care Brevan does. It seems like the sort of thing that would burn you up from the inside, not a listening ear you could whisper to in the dark.

“Anyway, it’s different now,” Brevan says. Their voice is still small, and now they sound legitimately upset - frustrated, that is, not hesitant or apologetic. “I can’t feel him listening anymore.”

“Since ascension?” Kennedy asks. He almost feels guilty. Brevan and the other transplants from the Fridays weren’t really supposed to ascend with the Crabs, they’re only here because the fans decided they should be. Ripped away from the immaterial plane without warning, or a chance to say goodbye.

“No,” Bevan says, with a sad little smile. “Since he was Released.”

So pretty much the same thing, Kennedy thinks but doesn’t say. The Hall Stars were released at the same time as the Crabs ascended. Naturally, one of those things got more fanfare than the other. There were bitter feelings about that amongst the Crabs for a while, and maybe there still are, but Kennedy personally doesn’t mind ascension being a bit overlooked. Not when the Crabs are having a season this bad in the big leagues.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Bevan. For all the incinerations that have happened, Kennedy never feels like he quite knows what to say to someone who’s lost someone dear to them. All he can do is apologize, like it’s somehow his fault, his burden to bear.

“You don’t have to say that,” Bevan says. They sit down on the floor, looking up at Kennedy, mouth twisted in a frown. “You didn’t do anything to make it that way, so you can’t be sorry for it.”

Kennedy swallows. He can’t remember the last time anyone told him something _wasn’t_ his responsibility, even though there are so many things that have ceased to be his responsibility since the Crabs ascended. Wrangling Tillman isn’t his responsibility anymore. Checking on Nagomi - in or out of her shell - isn’t his responsibility. Making sure Dreamy isn’t sleeping on the field after a game isn’t his responsibility. But Kennedy’s thrown himself into enough new responsibilities that they almost plaster over the hole where the old ones used to be.

“I am sorry,” he says, instead of saying any of that. “I’m sorry that you don’t have anyone to listen to you. I don’t have anyone to listen to me anymore, either.”

He doesn’t strictly mean for the admission to come out - or at least, he doesn’t mean for it to come out so honestly. But it’s out now, and Bevan is still staring at him with those wide, dark eyes that reflect the light like mirrors.

“Yes, you do,” Bevan says. “The Crabs all listen to you.”

“Not - that’s not what I mean,” Kennedy says, embarrassed. This was a mistake. He can’t think of any way in which having this conversation isn’t a mistake.

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean…” Kennedy begins, and exhales loudly. He leans backwards until he’s lying down on the bed with his legs hanging over the sides, partially because his lower back still hurts and partially so he doesn’t have to look Bevan in the eye. “The Crabs listen to me because I’m their captain. I don’t have anyone who listens to me in - in the way Landry listened to you, I guess. The Olde One used to do that, sometimes, and sometimes I would talk to Combs’ ashes, and I felt like they were out there somewhere paying attention.” He pauses, considering. “Maybe they were. I don’t know how the Null Team works, really. But since we ascended, it’s not the same.”

“You can’t feel them anymore,” Bevan offers, from their place on the floor that Kennedy can now no longer see.

“I can still talk to them, but it doesn’t feel right,” Kennedy agrees. “It doesn’t feel like _anything_. So I’m sorry you have to feel that too.”

His throat feels tight. He doesn’t think he’s going to cry, but this is the first time he’s admitted any of that out loud, the first time he’s done more than glance at those simmering feelings out of the corner of his eye and decide not to acknowledge them. Thinking about them feels like standing at the edge of a vast canyon full of some uncertain darkness, too large and too deep to comprehend.

The mattress creaks, and compresses slightly under the weight of another person. Kennedy looks up to find that Bevan is now sitting down next to him, rather than on the floor. He still can’t see their eyes boring into his own, so he thinks it might be fine.

“We could listen to each other,” Bevan says, softly.

Kennedy sits up. “What?”

“We could listen to each other,” Bevan repeats, somehow patient and reluctant at the same time. Kennedy can see they’re fiddling with the hem of their shirt again. “You could tell me the things that you need someone to listen to. I could tell you, too. Then we’d know someone was listening.” They pause, reach up to feel their antlers. “Maybe you don’t want to.”

“I...don’t know,” Kennedy says. A part of him _does_ want to. He can’t help but think of how good it might feel to know for certain, for once, that he’s being listened to. And not just his problems, but anything else he might want to say, anything he’s keeping below the surface in that dark canyon inside of him.

“I don’t know, either,” Bevan murmurs. “It’s different when the person you’re talking to is in the same room.”

“We don’t have to be in the same room,” Kennedy says. He may not be the best at taking stock of his emotions, but he _is_ good at problem solving, and this is a problem he can work. And he can understand not wanting to be in the same room, for something like this. He’s not sure he could talk in the way he does to the Olde One or to Combs if he could see Bevan sitting there, looking at him with those eyes of theirs.

“We could talk through the wall,” he says, slowly. “I mean - you said you can ask the Hotel for things, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“So you can ask it for two rooms next to each other. Or we can just find rooms like that. And we can talk through the wall. It doesn’t really matter if we hear _everything_ , as long as we know we’re...there.”

Maybe someday they can do it face to face, too, Kennedy thinks. Maybe someday he won’t feel too seen when Bevan looks at him. But there’s a certain comfort in being alone in a room but knowing someone else is just on the other side of the wall, of putting your hand to the wallpaper and acknowledging the thin barrier between your own body heat and theirs.

Bevan is quiet for a long time. Kennedy looks to them, but their face is turned away, and their body language is always so guarded that he can’t read it properly. Their shoulders seem perpetually hunched, raised up close to their ears as if preemptively guarding from an attack. Their thumbs circle over the fabric of their shirt in a self-soothing gesture.

“Okay,” Bevan says, finally. “I’d like that, I think.”

Kennedy allows himself to exhale, and smiles, though he knows Bevan can’t see him. “I’d like it, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> i like spooky deer and i think a lot about how bevan was possessed by landry and how their pre-game ritual is whispering. i think i accidentally talked myself into shipping bevan and kennedy while i was writing this. also we LOVE a haunted hotel.
> 
> title is specifically from the song [phantom](https://heatheraubreylloyd.bandcamp.com/track/phantom), comments are as always appreciated! you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers and elsewhere in the crabitat discord.


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